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Quark 8 Poll - poll closed


mhilger

QuarkXPress 8 - What are your plans to purchase?  

42 members have voted

  1. 1. QuarkXPress 8 - What are your plans to purchase?

    • Plans? We've already purchased it!
      16
    • Haven't pulled the trigger yet but plan to purchase in the next 6 months.
      2
    • Yeah... we'll probably get it. But more than 6 months from now.
      10
    • Nope - we have no plans to purchase it (but hey - thanks for asking)
      14


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Hi all,

 

Printable is interested to know what your plans are regarding purchasing QuarkXPress version 8. We currently do not have a template export plug-in for version 8 (but we do for versions 6.5 and 7) so we're trying to gauge the interest for a version 8 plug-in in an upcoming release of the FusionPro VDP suite.

 

So let us know what you think and of course - please feel free to add your comments to this thread as well.

 

Thanks all!

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think you should upgrade your software every time there's an update to Acrobat/Quark/InDesign, no matter what. Not doing so is a bad business move. You should always be ahead of the competition, not trailing behind it. There's always the "early adopters," companies with larger budgets who want access to their plug-ins once they upgrade their software. I'd be bummed if I had to wait for months to upgrade because some vendor hasn't updated their software. FusionPro is an excellent piece of software, and just "sitting on your laurels" waiting for people to tell you to upgrade is not a smart move. It doesn't show initiative.

 

Just my two cents... :-)

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I agree with you, with this BUT...

 

What if the industry demand for Quark is on the decline. Is it worth Printable to put in the development time? I know we adapt Quark more slowly than InDesign, because our customer demand for InDesign is much greater. I see a trend away from Quark, and you have to ask if it is still good business for Printable to assume that Quark is a top contender. You have to ask yourself why you picked those three - Acrobat/Quark/InDesign. Why didn't you say CorelDraw or Microsoft Publisher or Print Shop Platinum? When (if) Quark 12 gets released, would you still be able to say that Printable should take the time (and money, that gets filtered down to us, the end-user) to develop for it? Maybe only 2% of the industry would still using it. I agree with you that Printable should be as close to the cutting edge as they can, and we too wish they had the Quark 8 plugin in right now, but I can see it from their perspective - they need to gauge the industry to see if it's worth it.

 

/end Devil's Advocate rant

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Thank you both for your feedback. We will certainly look to support Quark 8 if there is adequate customer demand. That's exactly why we have created this poll - to gather customer feedback and thus to shape our roadmap.

 

We really do look to our customers to tell us what they are looking for in the new versions of FusionPro so this feedback is vital. Thanks again for voting!

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  • 1 month later...

I cast my vote back when this poll first debuted. As a prepress facility that deals with several agencies, we usually find we have to make an overnight purchase for a software product the day it's announced because our clients are beta testers and start using the new versions immediately.

 

Amazingly, we have not had a single file sent using Quark 8 to date. I would guess we only get 5% of our work in any version of Quark anymore. It looks like Quark and Pagemaker may have to share a flat at the city dump soon.

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  • 1 month later...
If you are going to make FusionPro work with Quark 8, see what you can do to get template PDF sizes down for FusionPro Web use. The PDFs that are exported from Quark are 3 - 5 times the size of the same file done in InDesign. This makes high res previews in the web stores take forever (by todays standards) to download. Who's going to sit there for a 10mb pdf to download?
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  • 5 months later...
As a printer we need to stay current on all new software. I would think Printable would do the same. I was surprised to see windows 7 support but no Snow Leopard yet. Apparently Printable has a much larger Windows base than Mac. I hate being in the back seat all the time to such an inferior operating system. :-)
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As a printer we need to stay current on all new software. I would think Printable would do the same.

Us too, but I wouldn't expect Printable to start developing a plug-in for Publisher 2010.

 

I was surprised to see windows 7 support but no Snow Leopard yet. Apparently Printable has a much larger Windows base than Mac.

Windows 7 was not a big code base jump as Snow Leopard.

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Thanks, pmhapp.

 

We have a huge Mac install base for Desktop and will continue to support the Mac platform on an equal footing with our Windows support as best we can.

 

The problem is, Apple consistently changes what developers need to do to support the Mac OS. Within the lower-level codebase of FusionPro, for example, we have some code that we wrote for Windows NT a decade ago that still works like a charm under Windows 7. Yet we have some code we wrote for the Mac OS just a few years ago which needs to be scrapped and re-written to support the latest requirements for the Mac OS. This code itself was a re-write from an earlier chunk of code we had for the Mac OS.

 

The cost of development and QA strictly concerning OS support on the Mac over the years is literally hundreds - if not thousands - of times more expensive for us. There's not much we can do about this (unless anyone has any pull in the Apple development roadmap and can help ensure that the code we write today will work under Mac OS 10.7, 10.8, etc). :cool:

 

Still, we recognize the needs of our customers to offer Mac support and we will to meet that need regardless of the extra time and cost required.

 

Hope this perspective helps understand where Printable stands on Mac support and some of the challenges we face here. It's a cost of doing business but a necessity.

 

Thanks for your post on this.

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  • 3 months later...

Hi all,

 

With the release of v6.2 of the FusionPro VDP suite, we have now added support for QuarkXpress 8.x.

 

While we have seen a lighter demand for supporting this version of Quark than previous versions, we understand that there are not only some extremely loyal Quark users out there, but also our customers are receiving artwork from their customers that may be in the Quark 8 format. This means our customers need to purchase Quark 8 and thus looked to Printable to support this version with our FusionPro template export plug-in. This cycle of upgrading will certainly continue, of course, and we'll be there to meet that market need.

 

Lastly, I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to vote in this user poll. It was certainly taken into consideration as we planned our roadmap and FusionPro 6.x release schedule so thank you for helping Printable with this decision!

 

So all you Quark 8 users - go grab the 6.2 release and let us know what you think!

 

Thanks all.

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